Every hallway at CloudFest is basically a focus group. Ask any hoster, MSP, or web agency lead what’s keeping them up at night, and you’ll get an earful: AI hype fatigue, margin pressure, sovereignty headaches, the works. The problem has never been a shortage of opinions in this community. It’s that nobody was writing them down.
That changes with CloudFest Community Intelligence, CloudFest’s new workshop series that takes the hopes, dreams, and 3 a.m. anxieties of the Cloud world and turns them into something you can actually use: real research, delivered live, for free.
What this actually is
Community Intelligence isn’t another webinar where someone reads slides at you for 45 minutes. It’s a working session with the people building the data itself—Dr. Brooke Edge, a brand researcher and former features reporter now running consumer insight strategy at Open Eye, and Jordan Yerman, CloudFest’s senior copywriter and the guy who’s spent years translating industry chatter into sharper messaging. CEO Christian Jaeger joins the first session too, which tells you this isn’t a side project. It’s a genuine bet on what the CloudFest community knows collectively that no single company can see alone.
The series kicks off Thursday, September 10 at 16:30 CET with Data, Not Drama: Cloud Industry Sentiment in Numbers, an introduction to the methodology, the “why now,” and a chance to shape the research agenda by bringing your own burning questions. It’s less a presentation than a working meeting: you’ll hear how the data gets collected and interpreted, and you’ll get a direct line to the people deciding what gets studied next.
Why this matters more than another report
Plenty of firms will sell you a market report built from anonymous survey panels and generic personas. This is different because the sample is you—operators who show up at Europa-Park, run the servers, sign the MSP contracts, and argue about pricing models over conference-hall coffee. That’s a harder thing to quantify, and also a far more useful one. A recent industry survey of B2B marketing leaders found the vast majority now see original, first-party research as the most effective way to earn trust and cut through the noise, generic commentary just doesn’t land the way it used to. Community Intelligence is CloudFest’s attempt to give this community that same edge, built from the inside rather than bought from an analyst firm.
If you’ve read our State of the Cloud Report, think of this as its live, conversational sequel—less “here’s the PDF,” more “here’s the PDF, now come argue with the people who made it.”
No pass required
You don’t need a CloudFest ticket to join. These sessions are free, run over Microsoft Teams, and open to anyone in the CSP, hosting, MSP, or web agency world who wants a sharper read on where the industry is actually headed versus where the headlines say it’s headed. Bring your questions. Bring your skepticism about AI margins. Bring whatever’s kept you up this quarter, that’s the whole point.
Grab a seat before September 10 fills up.
